For a long time Now

This continues from before but the person is no longer inside his room.

For a long time, he had been wondering how he could actually describe how he usually feels from the inside or how suddenly a song that he wants to forget pins him down in a grip that could be considered a sign of weakness, for to be emotional is not being practical, and language that is ordinary, that uses words that are not his usual forte, could mean impending doom. He was also sure that his thoughts were not easily describable, for they were a mixture of misgivings and unmade promises, of sudden eclipses and unheard voices or a motley din of things that he lived on but only from the inside. And how could he consider it possible to give an example from a movie watched recently or a poem badly written, for the written and spoken languages are not the same.

He thought that I love you, if scribbled, seems like a confession while a partly meant confession of love is easy on the lips, for eyes and hands come to the rescue, detaching from his body a load, a weight that hangs heavy on his heart sometimes. It was also his opinion that his friends never believed what he truly thought about life, life that he thought was unliveable in opposition to what he actually lived, which from the outside looked easy. But then, how could this whole wordy experience be communicated unless the written word actually climbed out of his own heart, at that moment in time, whenever he felt that suffocating need. For at least he knew that the written or spoken word after the moment loses import in description.

These thoughts had been troubling him for long, even when days fell into his lap one by one rather than all together and nights came easy and gentle, and his window and his moon and his eyes and his fingers were not haunted. For he was haunted even if he did not seem so from the outside, but haunted from the inside, laid siege to by sentences and images, thoughts and ideas, memories and regrets and pain and a life that was rushing past him, a regret that he could not isolate and dissect, and say here is this atrocious hour of my life, where I was undone, undone by my heart, undone by you, you who did not know the difference between an elegy and a tear. Yes, he was feeling elegiac, but in a city of cement and parks and trams and trains, where the ideal bench or the saddest cafe does not exist, where there are no monuments for the person who cannot describe, cannot reach out, whose language and thoughts are locked in a platonic embrace.

And he knew, even this painstaking exercise of carefully objectifying his feelings came to nothing, for he usually forgot what he wanted to think right from the beginning for while doing so, he lost what he knew was important and forget entirely what he needed to think. So when they last met, he wanted to remember how she got up from the bench they had sat on, did she actually leave then or linger on, or did they both, now petrified of each other, say loud goodbyes? This, he thought, was a sign of a haunted man, but haunted from the inside, for all outward appearances he still could voice an opinion, even if half heartedly but all the time, thinking of the unstuck doors of his inside, doors that could crash on him, leaving him at the most with a ten line poem. For a long time now, he has been thinking these thoughts, but do such thoughts matter?

For a long time now, he has wanted to declare that his night and his palms, his eyes and his grip, his poems and his stare, his love and his silence, his heart and his solitude were the saddest, but how could he describe these things, for they only existed inside him, and these things must climb out from the inside, a haunted inside, because outwardly he was calm, but how sad from the inside.